A few points...

Did you mean contentious hardfork? We should get a good understanding of how those work over the next couple days. (FWIW, I disagree with the ETH hardfork to bailout theDAO, but do think it will provide extremely valuable data as to how a network split is resolved by mining and exchange activity.)

A capability-bifurcated node network through segwit softfork is ugly, and some would say immoral. People like Mircea Popescu can and will proclaim pure segwit to segwit transactions to be a merge mined altcoin, and he won't be wrong. It further cements the idea that dramatic changes can be foisted upon the network without node consent, with only the approval of a handful of mining pool ops. Leaving regular full nodes blind to the fact that anything had changed isn't a positive imo, and it will be used in the future once the precedent is fully accepted and normalized. People who tout protocol immutability as an intrinsic value should be screaming against soft forks, yet they cheerlead them.

A successful HF to increase Bitcoin's capacity is about the most bullish scenario I can imagine, too bad it has been successfully painted with a black brush to the point we may never see one in Bitcoin. After all, anything that could be done in a clean HF with full node consent can be SF'd in a "creative" way with only miner consent.

I don't get your last statement, we stay bullish for at least a year while we wait for the hub and spoke gift card BTC-IOU to emerge into functional form? Do you sell if/when it crosses the vapor barrier?

We know that 0.13 rc1 is minutes away from release, and it won't contain segwit... so the network operates at capacity for how much longer? Where do these new users and use cases fit in to provide a bullish scenario? Are we just banking on world financial armageddon to happen so scared plebs send their savings on wires to exchanges and become a new generation of baghodlers while we buy boats and lambos?

I'll take this as a form of humor.


Many intelligent investment circles (or maybe referred to as smart money... just kidding)... refer to this methodology, and warren buffet is known to preach such a technique, including his famous statement about buying when there is "blood in the streets."






Our overall approach may not be too different, even though our tweaking by learning may end up being applied a little bit differently based on our reading of the market.  Of course we are not going to want to buy a whole bunch if we are fairly certain that the price is going to continue to go down in the short term, nor are we going to want to sell a bunch if we are fairly certain that the price is going to go up in the short term.  Yet, we also may not want to miss some smaller swings, either... yet these are kind of judgement calls.  For example, if the price appears to be moving up quickly and seems to be on a 10% upwards trajectory, I still would likely to sell smaller amounts every 2% or so and then maybe bigger chucks when it reaches close to a 10% adjustment.  Trying to play a little bit of both, and each of us is going to come to different conclusions regarding how to approach these kinds of movements, yet I personally am not competing with anyone to make more profits, I am just trying to feel comfortable with myself, even if I leave a bit on the table, here and there, which actually happens from time to time (actually regularly).



I remember that sale of yours to be around $420, and yes, that is an example of a preemptive strike, and I find nothing really wrong with making those kinds of preemptive strike decisions, if that makes you feel better under whatever is the then current market conditions that you perceive.




I think that I am a lot more comfortable with an ongoing analysis of the situation, and trying to predict a year in bitcoinlandia is nearly impossible because we really do not know what cards various actors have up their sleeves, if any.

Take for example the most recent price splurge above $500.  Each of us who are watching BTC prices and how things play out kind of had our theories regarding whether prices would go above $500 and how it could possibly play out.  For me, it has kind of played out how I was thinking, but at the same time, it is quite a bit different with how I was thinking as well, so I have to adjust my thinking regarding how it actually played out versus what I had previously been thinking.

Previously, I thought that once BTC prices went passed $500, it would kind of shoot up passed $600 and maybe even passed $700 and then likely correct back down below $500... I mean the way that the price performance played out was quite a bit different from what I expected, I went up on lower volume and it took longer to get up, and then the corrections were not as severe (at least not yet), and in the end, even though BTC prices did not reach into the $800s, the way that it played out was much more bullish than I had anticipated... so I needed to adjust some of my thinking.. and sure, it is still possible that the price could correct below $500, but the odds are seeming greater and greater, and the costs (and resistance) in which to achieve such an objective to get prices into the sub- $500s seems to be much higher... I try not to see bitcoin's future prices and the bitcoin world in terms of absolutes (until after something maybe have already happened), but like you, I do try to weigh probabilities and go with trends - even though my conclusions regarding probabilities may not be the same as yours and therefore my actions are going to be affected.

So in respect to the next year, we gotta just see how it plays out and to continue to make our predictions based on how things are playing out, but in a general sense I agree with you that there are a lot of BTC fundamentals in place at the current moment to allow for the likelihood that a bull market could continue to endure for a year or even longer... could be slow or could be fast or could be a combination of ongoing and onward bullish and upwards price pressures that the bears are unable to stop without expending more capital than they want to expend.

I think that you personally have a bit of a difficulty too with my approach of buying on the way down and selling on the way up because sometimes you are suggesting to do the opposite and to pre-empt, and that just is not my style  even though a lot of folks engage in attempts to preemptively strike.

If the majority is wrong, and is sinking all of its efforts into an exercise in mental masturbation, going with the majority is simply wrong. And asking me to support wasted effort, building a scaling solution that's not a scaling solution but is, basically, a solution in need of a problem, that's wrong too. I'm not going to cheer it on just because "we are pushing with everything we got."

No, what I'm saying is the utility of that channel is going to be next to nil, because BTC typically flows in one direction, not back-and-forth, due to the nature of arbitrage. So it will be 25 BTC from Rock to BFX, another 25 BTC from Rock to BFX, and another, and another. All small, all going in one direction, because BTC costs less on TheRock. Until things change and it starts going in a different direction, to OKCoin, which is another open channel with 50BTC stuck in it that's only good for 2 tx.

Scaling != LN. Two different things. I hope you're not telling me that by pointing out LN's shortcomings, I'm betting on failure.
There's that changing a constant trick. More than one way to skin a cat, but LN ain't one of them.

Right. You understand that the benefits of LN are actually negative if you open a channel, make two transactions, and close it?
Why can't they be like other grownup businesses, do the whole thing off-chain, as if it was USD, and bill each other at the end of the month? Or do you think everything* surrounding Bitcoin should be trusttless and as complicated as possible?

As soon as two 50 BTC transactions go in one direction (as is usually almost always the case with arbitrage), say bye bye to that "balance."

Correct. One macro-transaction.


So TheRock has an open channel with BFX, prefunded with a humongous sum of BTC, as much as the two exchanges are likely to swap, in, say, a month? How many million BTC is that?

As long as TheRock has a channel with Hamburger Bob, open and funded, sounds like a plan. How much money did TheRock start out with, I mean before it funded all these channels? Are there enough bitcoins in the world for that?

Or they can do it without involving Bitcoin at all, and just send numbers to each other, settle shit with macro-transactions on the first of the month, like every business in the world does.

I'm not sure I follow. If I want to pay Bob for a hamburger with BitPay, how would LN play into this? I have an open, pre-funded channel with BitPay, and BitPay has open, pre-funded channels with everyone I want to do business with? That's a *huge* sum of BTC to tie up.
If not clear, before using BitPay, I'd have to open a payment channel with BitPay, and fund it with as much BTC as I'm likely to spend with BitPay in, let's say, a month. That's a big chunk of change, but that's not all. BitPay has to keep a huge number of open channels with all of its users, and those channels all have to be funded. That's a huge chunk of change squared.

I can see LN being useful, but it's not a scaling solution.
Let's take micropayments (assuming that by "arbitrarily small," you mean sub-$2 now, sub $4 when the tx fees double, etc., but that's a different topic).

Why are micropayments useful? Let's say Google is charging me per search: there's absolutely no reason for Google not to tally the number of searches I do on their own database, and then bill me by the month. Is there?
So micropayments aren't needed for sites that I use often, but LN is utterly useless to me if I need to make a micropayment to a site I never visited - I'd need to create a channel first.

In short, give me some compelling use cases for micropayments which couldn't be handled simpler without LN. I'm sure there are many, but just can't think of them offhand.

Look at you?  seeming to not be able to resist getting in a kind of non-substantive ad hominem attack.  You don't even explain what was wrong with my approach.  Are you saying (in retrospect monday morning quarterbacking) that there was something fundamentally wrong with my approach?  Do you know enough about my approach?   I don't really want to get caught up on this, except to suggest that you really don't have anything here, except some desire to get in a bit of a digg, for some reason?

As you know, Adam, I have approached my bitcoin investment from a dollar cost averaging strategy.  Surely, if I was just getting into bitcoin now, my approach would likely be similar, but certainly my BTC/fiat position would be different, merely from the fact that I have already been buying and accumulating BTC for about 2 and 2/3 years now (wow time flies!!).  

I mean I get your point that currently bitcoin is likely more of a "buy, buy, buy" than it was in November 2013 (hindsight is 20/20); however, since I am already have largely invested and taken my position, it is not like I can go out and start to leverage in bitcoin  or changing my strategy merely because I believe that bitcoin is more of a "buy, buy, buy" now than it was in November 2013.

In other words, already largely in.. buy on the way down and sell on the way up... that is my current and ongoing position in BTC... and ongoing strategy.

I am happy with my total BTC accumulation, my average price per BTC and my having had stacked up fiat for the way down, just in case the price goes down and it feels like plenty of BTC (in comparison to my total wealth and liquid assets) in case BTC prices go up.  

Anyhow, you seem to be asserting that the fundamentals are very strong and should be buying, buying, buying right now, but that is not going to work for some folks, unless they are maybe just getting into BTC or maybe they had sold a bunch in the $700s or even upper $600s or for some other reason they have come across extra cash.  

I already have gotten to know you sufficiently to understand that you sometimes will exaggerate a bit, just to make your points, yet I also believe that you are a bit more of a gambler than me.

Surely, each of us has our investing style.  

I personally would rather play the whole bitcoin thingie ma jiggie more conservatively and make less money than to take chances on betting one way or another or stacking too much fiat into BTC when my BTC investing portfolio is already in a pretty decent position with currently about 95% in BTC and 5% in fiat...

In other words, I am not going to change my investment to 96% BTC or any higher amount unless BTC prices go down and more or less force me to allocate a higher percentage of my portfolio into BTC.  

Several times that I've heard these kinds of predictions... Call me either overly cautious or  sccccaaaaarrrrrrreeeeeedddd.   

That's not Bitcoin, that's OneCoin the Bitcoin killer. Last I heard they were swtiching on their new block chain to the tune of 120 billion coins. Bigger than Ripple!
NB. There's no actual block chain, so to speak.

It's called brexit.  And it made my bells ring;)